Month: January 2021

Grassroots football: Insights from a volunteer football coach

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Pictured above Volunteer Coach Tony Page with the Beckwithshaw Saints Junior Boys Football Club. In this post we speak to Tony Page, Volunteer Football Coach for Beckwithshaw Saints Junior Football Club. For the past 3 years Tony has coached the under 13 boys team, which Human Kinetics now proudly sponsor.  We wanted to catch up with Tony to find out more about his experiences and insights as a volunteer football coach.  How did you get into coaching? My son, Oli, began playing for Beckwithshaw Saints. At training most parents stood politely in the parent zone. However I couldn’t stand still and used to prowl around the pitches intent on learning and inwardly critiquing what was going on!  It was clear there was an unofficial A team and a B team. Oli was in the B team due to his late start into football and this team received much less attention from the pre-existing coaches. I took a keen interest from the side-lines, and whilst I didn’t for one minute assume I could do better, I …

How to achieve attention and focus in dance via online channels

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In this post author of Attention and Focus in Dance, Clare Guss-West, writes about how to achieve attention and focus in dance when teaching or learning dance via online platforms. Many dancers and teachers are facing the prospect of further restrictive measures and moving into 2021 continuing to dance and learn through virtual means. In 2020 we all demonstrated tremendous adaptability and creativity, quickly developing new technological and presentational skills in order to adapt to the circumstances. For some dancing publics even, advantages were experienced as dance became more accessible and more dance-per-week than ever became possible. Let’s not fool ourselves however, dancing with a screen is a great resource to have in extremis, however in terms of our ability to attend to the learning material – it’s a very different experience. As dancers first and foremost we need to be patient with ourselves and try to understand the attentional frustrations that we are experiencing. Dancing with a screen is the equivalent of suffering sudden ‘sensorial impairment’ overnight. Live in the dance studio, we learn by taking …